Downbelow Station Part 1

Downbelow Station.

A Union-Alliance novel.

C. J. Cherryh.

BOOK 1.

Chapter One.

Earth and Outward: 2005-2352.

The stars, like all man's other ventures, were an obvious impracticality, as rash and improbable an ambition as the first venture of man onto Earth's own great oceans, or into the air, or into s.p.a.ce. Sol Station had existed profitably for some years; there were the beginnings of mines, the manufacturies, the power installations in s.p.a.ce which were beginning to pay. Earth took them for granted as quickly as it did all its other comforts. Missions from the station explored the system, a program far from public understanding, but it met no strong opposition, since it did not disturb the comfort of Earth. So quietly, very matter of factly, that first probe went out to the two nearest stars, unmanned, to gather data and return, a task in itself of considerable complexity. The launch from station drew some public interest, but years was a long time to wait for a result, and it pa.s.sed out of media interest as quickly as it did out of the solar system. It drew a great deal more attention on its return, nostalgia on the part of those who recalled its launch more than a decade before, curiosity on the part of the young who had known little of its beginning and wondered what it was all about. It was a scientific success, bringing back data enough to keep the a.n.a.lysts busy for years... but there was no glib, slick way to explain the full meaning of its observations in layman's terms. In public relations the mission was a failure; the public, seeking to understand on their own terms, looked for material benefit, treasure, riches, dramatic findings.

What the probe had found was a star with reasonable possibilities for encouraging life; a belt of debris, including particles, planetoids, irregular chunks somewhat under planet size with interesting implications for systemic formation, and a planetary companion with its own system of debris and moons... a planet desolate, baked, forbidding. It was no Eden, no second Earth, no better than what existed in the sun's own system, and it was a far journey to have gone to find that out. The press grappled with questions it could not easily grasp itself, sought after something to give the viewers, lost interest quickly. If anything, there were questions raised about cost, vague and desperate comparisons offered to Columbus , and the press hared off quickly onto a political crisis in the Mediterranean , much more comprehensible and far bloodier.

The scientific establishment on Sol Station breathed a sigh of relief and with equal quiet caution invested a portion of its budget in a modest manned expedition, to voyage in what amounted to a traveling miniature of Sol Station itself, and to stay a time making observations in orbit about that world. And very quietly, to further imitate Sol Station, to test manufacturing techniques which had built Earth's great second satellite... in stranger conditions. Sol Corporation supplied a generous grant, having a certain curiosity, a certain understanding of stations and what profits could be looked for from their development That was the beginning.

The same principles which had made Sol Station practical made the first star-station viable. It needed a bare minimum of supply in biostuffs from Earth... mostly luxuries to make life more pleasant for the increasing number of techs and scientists and families stationed there. It mined; and as its own needs diminished, would send back the surplus of its ores... so the first link in the chain was made. No need, no need at all, that first colony had proven, that a star have a world friendly to humans, no need even for a moderate sun-type star... just the solar wind and the usual accompanying debris of metals and rock and ice. One station built, a station module could be hauled to the next star, whatever it was. Scientific bases, manufacture: bases from which the next hopeful star could be reached; and the next and the next and the next. Earth's outward exploration developed in one narrow vector, one little fan which grew at its broader end.

Sol Corporation, swollen beyond its original purpose and holding more stations than Sol itself, became what the star-stationers called it: the Earth Company. It wielded power... certainly over the stations which it directed long-distance, years removed in s.p.a.ce; and power on Earth too, where its increasing supply of ores, medical items, and its possession of several patents were enormously profitable. Slow as the system was in starting, the steady arrival of goods and new ideas, however long ago launched, was profit for the Company and consequent power on Earth. The Company sent merchant carriers in greater and greater numbers: that was all it needed to do now. The crews which manned those ships on the long flights grew into an inward-turned and unique way of life, demanding nothing but improvement of equipment which they had come to think of as their own; station in turn supported station, each shifting Earth's goods a step further on to its nearest neighbor, and the whole circular exchange ending up back on Sol Station where the bulk of it was drained off in high rates charged for biostuffs and such goods as only Earth produced. Those were the great good days for those who sold this wealth: fortunes rose and fell; governments did; corporations took on more and more power, and the Earth Company in its many guises reaped immense profits and moved the affairs of nations. It was an age of restlessness. Newly industrialized populations and the discontents of every nation set out on that long, long track in search of jobs, wealth, private dreams of freedom, the old lure of the New World , human patterns recapitulated across a new and wider ocean, to stranger lands. Sol Station became a stepping-off place, no longer exotic, but safe and known. The Earth Company flourished, drinking in the wealth of the star-stations, another comfort which those who received it began to take for granted. And the star-stations clung to the memory of that lively, diverse world which had sent them, Mother Earth in a new and emotion-fraught connotation, she who sent out precious stuffs to comfort them; comforts which in a desert universe reminded them there was at least one living mote. The Earth Company ships were the lifeline... and the Earth Company probes were the romance of their existence, the light, swift exploration ships which let them grow more selective about next steps. It was the age of the Great Circle, no circle at all, but the course which the Earth Company freighters ran in constant travel, the beginning and end of which was Mother Earth.

Star after star after star... nine of them-until Pell, which proved to have a livable world, and life.

That was the thing which cancelled all bets, upset the balance, forever. Pell's Star, and Pell's World, named for a probe captain who had located it-finding not alone a world, but indigenes, natives. It took a long time for word to travel the Great Circle back to Earth; less for word of the find to get to the nearer star-stations... and more than scientists came flocking to Pell's World. Local station companies who knew the economics of the matter came rushing to the star, not to be left behind; population came, and two of the stations...o...b..ting less interesting stars nearby were dangerously depleted, ultimately to collapse altogether. In the burst of growth and the upheaval of building a station at Pell, ambitious people were already casting eyes toward two farther stars, beyond Pell, calculating with cold foresight, for Pell was itself a source of Earthlike goods, luxuries-a potential disturbance in the directions of trade and supply.

For Earth, as word rode in with arriving freighters&h.e.l.lip a frantic haste to ignore Pell. Alien life. It sent shock waves through the Company, touched off moral debates and policy debates in spite of the fact that the news was almost two decades old-as if they could set hand now to whatever decisions were being made out there in the Beyond. It was all out of control. Other life. It disrupted man's dearly held ideas of cosmic reality. It raised philosophical and religious questions, presented realities some committed suicide rather than face. Cults sprang up. But, other arriving ships reported, the aliens of Pell's World were not outstandingly intelligent, nor violent, built nothing, and looked more like lower primates than not, brown-furred and naked and with large, bewildered eyes.

Ah, earthbound man sighed. The human-centered, Earth-centered universe in which Earth had always believed had been shaken, but quickly righted itself. The isolationists who opposed the Company gathered influence and numbers in reaction to the scare-and to a sudden and marked drop in trade. The Company was in chaos. It took long to send instructions, and Pell grew, out of the Company's control. New stations unauthorized by the Earth Company sprang into existence at farther stars, stations called Mariner and Viking; and they sp.a.w.ned Russell's and Esperance. By the time Company instructions arrived down the line, bidding now-stripped nearer stations take this and that action to stabilize trade, the orders were patent nonsense.

In fact, a new pattern of trade had already developed. Pell had the necessary biostuffs. It was closer to most of the star-stations; and star-station companies which had once seen Earth as beloved Mother now saw new opportunities, and seized them. Still other stations formed. The Great Circle was broken. Some Earth Company ships kited off to trade with the New Beyond, and there was no way to stop them. Trade continued, never what it had been. The value of Earth's goods fell, and consequently it cost Earth more and more to obtain the one-time bounty of the colonies.

A second shock struck. Another world lay Beyond, discovered by an enterprising merchanter... Cyteen. Further stations developed-Fargone and Paradise and Wyatt's, and the Great Circle stretched farther still.

The Earth Company took a new decision: a payback program, a tax of goods, which would make up recent losses. They argued to the stations of the Community of Man, the Moral Debt, and the burden of grat.i.tude.

Some stations and merchanters paid the tax. Some refused it, particularly those stations beyond Pell, and Cyteen. The Company, they maintained, had had no part in their development and had no claim on them. There was a system of papers and visas inst.i.tuted, and inspections called for, bitterly resented by the merchants, who viewed their ships as their own.

More, the probes were pulled back, tacit statement that the Company was putting an official damper on further growth of the Beyond. They were armed, the swift exploration ships, which they had always been, venturing as they did into the unknown; but now they were used in a new way, to visit stations and pull them into line. That was bitterest of all, that the crews of the probe ships, who had been the heroes of the Beyond, became the Company enforcers. Merchanters armed in retaliation, freighters never built for combat, incapable of tight turns. But there were skirmishes between the converted probe ships and rebel merchanters, although most merchanters declared their reluctant consent to the tax. The rebels retreated to the outermost colonies, least convenient for enforcement.

It became war without anyone calling it war... armed Company probes against the rebel merchanters, who served the farther stars, a circ.u.mstance possible because there was Cyteen, and even Pell was not indispensible. So the line was drawn. The Great Circle resumed, exclusive of the stars beyond Fargone, but never so profitable as it had been. Trade continued across the line after strange fashion, for tax-paying merchanters could go where they would, and rebel merchanters could not, but stamps could be faked, and were. The war was leisurely, a matter of shots fired when a rebel was clearly available as a target. The Company ships could not resurrect the stations immediately Earthward of Pell; they were no longer viable. The populations drifted to Pell and Russell's and Mariner and Viking, and to Fargone and farther still. Ships were built, as stations had been, in the Beyond. The technology was there, and merchanters proliferated. Then jump arrived-a theory originated in the New Beyond, at Cyteen, quickly seized upon by shipbuilders at Mariner on the Company side of the line.

And that was the third great blow to Earth. The old lightbound way of figuring was obsolete. Jump freighters skipped along in short transits into the between; but the time it took from star to star went from years to periods of months and days. Technology improved. Trade became a new kind of game and strategy in the long war changed... stations knit closer together.

Suddenly, out of this, there was an organization among the rebels farthest Beyond. It started as a coalition of Fargone and its mines; it swept to Cyteen, gathered to itself Paradise and Wyatt's, and reached for other stars and the merchanters who served them. There were rumors... of vast population increases going on for years unreported, technology once suggested on the Company side of the line, when the need was for men, for human lives to fill up the vast dark nothingness, to work and to build. Cyteen had been doing it. This organization, this Union, as it called itself, bred and multiplied geometrically, using installations already in operation, birth-labs. Union grew. It had, in the course of two decades, increased enormously in territory and in population density, it offered a single, unswerving ideology of growth and colonization, a focused direction to what had been a disorganized rebellion. It silenced dissent, mobilized, organized, pushed hard at the Company. And in final, outraged public demand for results in the deteriorating situation, the Earth Company back on Sol Station gave up the tax, diverted that fund to the building of a great Fleet, all jumpships, engines of destruction, Europe and America and all their deadly kindred.

So was Union building, developing specialized warships, changing style as it changed technology. Rebel captains who had fought long years for their own reasons were charged with softness at the first excuse; ships were put into the hands of commanders with the right ideology, with more ruthlessness. Company successes grew harder. The great Fleet, outnumbered and with an immense territory to cover, did not bring an end to the war in a year or in five years. And Earth grew vexed with what had become an inglorious, exasperating conflict. Cut all the starships, the cry was now in the financing corporations. Pull back our ships and let the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds starve.

It was of course the Company Fleet which starved; Union did not, but Earth seemed incapable of understanding that, that it was no longer a question of fragile colonies in rebellion but of a forming power, well-fed, well-armed. The same myopic policies, the same tug-of-war between isolationists and Company which had alienated the colonies in the first place drew harder and harder lines as trade diminished; they lost the war not in the Beyond, but in the senate chambers and the boardrooms on Earth and Sol Station, going for mining within Earth's own system, which was profitable, and devil take the exploratory missions in any direction at all, which were not.

No matter that they had jump now and that the stars were near. Their minds were geared to the old problems and to their own problems and their own politics. Earth banned further emigration, seeing the flight of its best minds. It weltered in economic chaos, and the drain of Earth's natural resources by the stations was an easy focus of discontent. No more war, they said; peace suddenly became good politics. The Company Fleet, deprived of funds in a war in which it was engaged on a wide front, obtained supplies where and as it could. At the end, they were patchwork, fifteen carriers out of the once proud fifty, cobbled together at the stations still open to them. Mazian's Fleet, they called it, in the tradition of the Beyond, where ships were so few at first that enemies knew each other by name and reputation... a recognition less common now, but some names were known. Conrad Mazian of Europe was a name Union knew to its regret; and Tom Edger of Australia was another; and Mika Kreshov of Atlantic, and Signy Mallory of Norway; and all the rest of the Company captains, down to those of the rider-ships. They still served Earth and the Company, with less and less love of either. None of this generation was Earthborn; they received few replacements, none from Earth, none from the stations in their territory either, for the stations feared obsessively for their neutrality in the war. Merchanters were their source of skilled crew and of troops, most of them unwilling. The Beyond had once begun with the stars nearest Earth and now it started with Pell, for the oldest stations were shut down as Earthward trade phased out and the pre-jump style of trade pa.s.sed forever. The Hinder Stars were all forgotten, unvisited.

There were worlds beyond Pell, beyond Cyteen, and Union had them all now, real worlds, of the far-between stars which jump could reach; where Union used the birth labs still to expand populations, giving them workers and soldiers. Union wanted all the Beyond, to direct what would be the course of the future of man. Union had the Beyond, all but the thin arc of stations which Mazian's Fleet still thanklessly held for Earth and the Company, because they had once been set to do that, because they saw nothing they could do but that. At their backs was only Pell... and the mothballed stations of the Hinder Stars. Remoter still, isolate... sat Earth, locked in its inner contemplations and its complex, fragmented politics.

No trade of substance came out of Sol now, or to it. In the insanity which was the War, free merchanters plied Unionside and Company Stars alike, crossed the battle lines at will, although Union discouraged that traffic by subtle hara.s.sments, seeking to cut Company supply.

Union expanded and the Company Fleet just held on, worldless but for Pell which fed them, and Earth which ignored them. On Unionside, stations were no longer built on the old scale. They were mere depots for worlds now, and probes sought still further stars. They were generations which had never seen Earth... humans to whom Europe and Atlantic were creatures of metal and terror, generations whose way of life was stars, infinities, unlimited growth, and time which looked to forever. Earth did not understand them.

But neither did the stations which remained with the Company or the free merchanters who carried on that strange crosslines trade.

Chapter Two.

In Approach to Pell: 5/2/52 The convoy winked in, the carrier Norway first, and then the ten freighters-more, as Norway loosed her four riders and the protective formation spread itself wide in its approach to Pell's Star.

Here was refuge, one secure place the war had never yet reached, but it was the lapping of the tide. The worlds of the far Beyond were winning, and certainties were changing, on both sides of the line.

On the bridge of the ECS 5, the jump-carrier Norway, there was rapid activity, the four auxiliary command boards monitoring the riders, the long aisle of com operations and that of scan and that of their own command. Norway was in constant com link with the ten freighters, and the reports pa.s.sed back and forth on those channels were terse, ships' operations only. Norway was too busy for human disasters.

No ambushes. The station at Pell's World received signal and gave reluctant welcome. Relief whispered from post to post of the carrier, private, not carried on intership com. Signy Mallory, Norway's captain, relaxed muscles she had not known were tense and ordered armscomp downgraded to standby. She held command over this flock, third captain in seniority of the fifteen of Mazian's Fleet. She was forty-nine. The Beyonder Rebellion was far older than that; and she had been freighter pilot, rider captain, the whole gamut, all in the Earth Company's service. Her face was still young. Her hair was silver gray. The rejuv treatments which caused the gray kept the rest of her at somewhere near biological thirty-six; and considering what she shepherded in and what it portended, she felt aged beyond the forty-nine.

She leaned back in her cushion which looked over the upcurving, narrow aisles of the bridge, punched in on her arm console to check operations, stared out over the active stations and the screens which showed what vid picked up and what scan had Safe. She lived by never quite believing such estimations. And by adapting. They all did, all of them who fought this war. Norway was like her crew, varied salvage: of Brazil and Italia and Wasp and jinxed Miriam B, parts of her dating all the way back to the days of the freighter war. They took what they could, gave up as little as possible... as from the refugee ships she guided, under her protection. There had been in decades before, a time of chivalry in the war, of quixotic gestures, of enemy rescuing enemy and parting under truce. They were human and the Deep was wide,and they all had known it. No more. From among these civilians, neutrals, she had extracted the useful ones for herself, a handful who might adapt. There would be protests at Pell. It would do them no good. No protests would, on this or other matters. The war had taken another turn, and they were out of painless choices. They moved slowly, at the crawl which was the best the freighters could manage in reals.p.a.ce, distance Norway or the riders, unenc.u.mbered, could cross pushing light. They had come in dangerously close to the ma.s.s of Pell's Star, out of plane with the system, risking jump accident and collisions. It was the only way these freighters could make haste... and lives rode on making time. "Receiving approach instructions from Pell," com told her. "Graff," she said to her lieutenant, "take her in." And punching in another channel: "Di, put all troops on standby, full arms and gear." She switched back to com: "Advise Pell it had better evacuate a section and seal it. Tell the convoy if anyone breaks formation during approach we'll blow them. Make them believe it."

"Got it," com senior said; and in due time: "Stationmaster's on in person."

The stationmaster protested. She had expected so.

"You do it," she told him-Angelo Konstantin, of the Konstantins of Pell. "You clear that section or we do. You start now, strip out everything of value or hazard, down to the walls; and you put those doors on lock and weld the access panels shut. You don't know what we're bringing you. And if you delay us, I may have a shipload dead: Hansford's life support is going. You do it, Mr. Konstantin, or I send the troops in. And you don't do it right, Mr. Konstantin, and you have refugees scattered like vermin all over your station, with no id's and ugly-desperate. Forgive my bluntness. I have people dying in their own filth. We number seven thousand frightened civs on these ships, what left Mariner and Russell's Star. They're out of choices and out of time. You're not going to tell me no, sir."

There was a pause, distance, and more than enough delay for distance. "We've sounded the evacuation for sections of yellow and orange dock. Captain Mallory. Medical services will be available, all that we can spare. Emergency crews are moving. We copy regarding sealing of the affected areas. Security plans will be set in motion at once. We hope that your concern is as great for our citizens. This station will not permit the military to interfere in our internal-security operations or to jeopardize our neutrality, but a.s.sistance under our command will be appreciated. Over."

Signy relaxed slowly, wiped sweat from her face, drew an easier breath. "a.s.sistance will be given, sir. Estimated docking... four hours, if I delay this convoy all I can. I can give you that much time to get ready. Has news about Mariner gotten to you yet? It was blown, sir, sabotage. Over." "We copy four hours. We appreciate the measures you urge us to take and we are taking them in earnest. We are distressed to hear about the Mariner disaster. Request detailed briefing. Further advise you we have a Company team here at the moment It's highly distressed at these proceedings." She breathed an obscenity into the com.

"... and they're demanding to have all of you turned down for some other station. My staff is attempting to explain to them the condition of the ships and the hazard to life aboard them, but they're putting pressure on us. They consider Pell's neutrality threatened. Kindly appreciate that in your approach and bear in mind that the Company agents have requested contact with you in person. Over."

She repeated the obscenity, expelled a breath. The Fleet avoided such meetings when possible, rare as they were in the last decade. "Tell them I'll be busy. Keep them off the docks and out of our area. Do they need pictures of starving colonists to take back with them? Bad press, Mr. Konstantin. Keep them out of our way. Over."

"They're armed with government papers. Security Council. That kind of Company team. They have rank to use and they're demanding transport deeper Beyond. Over."

She chose a second obscenity and swallowed it. "Thank you, Mr. Konstantin. I'll capsule you my recommendations on procedures with the refugees; they've been worked out in detail. You can, of course, ignore them, but I'd advise against it. We can't even guarantee you that what we're disembarking on Pell isn't armed. We can't get among them to find out. Armed troops can't get in there, you understand? That's what we're giving you. I'd advise you keep the Company boys out of our docking area entirely before we have hostages to deal with. Copy? End transmission."

"We copy. Thank you, captain. End transmission."

She slumped in place, glared at the screens and shot an order to com to capsule the instructions to station command.

Company men. And refugees from lost stations. Information kept coming steadily from stricken Hansford, with a calm on the part of its crew she admired. Strictly procedures. They were dying over there. Crew was sealed into command and armed, refusing to abandon ship, refusing to let a rider take Hansford in tow. It was their ship. They stayed by it and did what they could for those aboard, by remote. They had no thanks from the pa.s.sengers, who were tearing the ship apart-or had been doing so, until the air fouled and the systems began to break down.

Four hours. ii Norway. Russell's had met disaster, and Mariner. Rumor ran through the station corridors, aboil with the confusion and anger of residents and companies that had been turned out with all their property. Volunteers and native workers aided in the evacuation; dock crews used the loading machinery to move personal belongings out of the area selected for quarantine, tagging items and trying not to confuse them or allow pilferage. Com echoed with announcements. "Residents of yellow one through one nineteen are asked to send a representative to the emergency housing desk. There is a lost child at the aid station, May Terner. Will a relative please come at once to the aid station?... Latest estimates from station central indicate housing available in guest residency, one thousand units. All nonresidents are being removed in favor of permanent station residents, priority to be determined by lottery. Apartments available by condensation of occupied units: ninety-two. Compartments available for emergency conversion to residential s.p.a.ce, two thousand, including public meeting areas and some mainday/alterday rotation of occupancy. The station council urges any person with personal arrangements possible through lodging with relatives or friends to secure same and to key this information to comp at the earliest possible; housing on private initiative will be compensated to the home resident at a rate equivalent to per capita expense for other housing. We are five hundred units deficient and this will require barracks-style housing for on-station residency, or transfer on a temporary basis for Downbelow residency, unless this deficiency can be made up by volunteering of housing or willingness of individuals to share a.s.signed living s.p.a.ce. Plans are to be considered immediately for residential use of section blue, which should free five hundred units within the next one hundred eighty days... Thank you... Will a security team please report to eight yellow?..." It was a nightmare. Damon Konstantin stared at the flow of printout and intermittently paced the matted floors of dock command blue sector, above the area of the docks where techs tried to cope with the logistics of evacuation. Two hours left. He could see from the series of windows the chaos all along the docks where personal belongings had been piled under police guard. Everyone and every installation in yellow and orange sectors' ninth through fifth levels had been displaced: dockside shops, homes, four thousand people crowded elsewhere. The influx spilled past blue, around the rim to green and white, the big main-residence sectors. Crowds milled about, bewildered and distraught. They understood the need: they moved-everyone on station was subject to such transfers of residence, for repairs, for reorganizations... but never on this kind of notice and never on this scale, and never without knowing where they were to be a.s.signed. Plans were cancelled, four thousand lives upset. Merchanters of the two score freighters which happened to be in dock had been rudely ousted from sleepover accommodations and security did not want them on the docks or near the ships. His wife, Elene, was down there in a knot of them, a slim figure in pale green. Liaison with the merchanters... that was Elene's job, and he was at her office fretting about it. He nervously watched the manner of the merchanters, which was angry, and meditated sending station police down there for Elene's protection; but Elene seemed to be matching them shout for shout, all lost in the soundproofing and the general buzz of voices and machine noise which faintly penetrated the elevated command post. Suddenly there were shrugs, and hands offered all round, as if there had been no quarrel at all. Some matter was either settled or postponed, and, Elene walked away and the merchanters strode off trough the dispossessed crowds, though with shakes of their heads and no happiness evident. Elene had disappeared beneath the slanted windows... to the lift, to come up here, Damon hoped. Off in green section his own office was dealing with an angry-resident protest; and there was the Company delegation fretting in station central making demands of its own on his father. "Will a medical team please report to section eight yellow?" com asked silkily.

Someone was in trouble, off in the evacuated sections. The lift doors opened into the command center. Elene joined him, her face still flushed from argument "Central's gone stark mad," she said. "The merchanters were moved out of hospice and told they had to lodge on their ships; and now they've got station police between them and their ships. They're wanting to cast off from station. They don't want their ships mobbed in some sudden evacuation. Read it that they'd just as soon be out of Pell's vicinity entirely at the moment. Mallory's been known to recruit merchanters at gunpoint."

"What did you tell them?"

"To stand fast and figure there are going to be some contracts handed out for supplies to take care of this influx; but they won't go to any ship that bolts the dock, or that tangles with our police. And that has the lid on them, at least for a while."

Elene was afraid. It was clear behind the brittle, busy calm. They were all afraid. He slipped his arm about her; hers fitted his waist and she leaned there, saying nothing. Merchanter, Elene Quen, off the freighter Estelle, which had gone its way to Russell's, and to Mariner. She had missed that run for him, to consider tying herself to a station for good, for his sake; and now she ended up trying to reason with angry crews who were probably right and sensible in her eyes, with the military in their laps. He viewed matters in a cold, quiet panic, stationer's fashion. Things which went wrong onstation went wrong sitting still, by quadrants and by sections, and there was a certain fatalism bred of it: if one was in a safe zone, one stayed there; if one had a job which could help, one did it; and if it was one's own area in trouble, one still sat fixed-it was the only heroism possible. A station could not shoot, could not run, could only suffer damage and repair it if there was time. Merchanters had other philosophies and different reflexes in time of trouble. "It's all right," he said, tightening his arm briefly. He felt her answering pressure. "It's not coming here. They're just putting civilians far behind the lines. They'll stay here till the crisis is over and then go back. If not, we've had big influxes before, when they shut down the last of the Hinder Stars. We added sections. We'll do it again. We just get larger." Elene said nothing. There were dire rumors drifting through com and down the corridors regarding the extent of the disaster at Mariner, and Estelle was not one of the incoming freighters. They knew that now for certain. She had hoped, when they had gotten the first news of the arrival; and feared, because there was damage reported on those ships out there, moving at freighters' slow pace, jammed with pa.s.sengers they were never designed to handle, in the series of small jumps a freighter's limited range made necessary. It added up to days and days in reals.p.a.ce as far as they had come in, and living h.e.l.l on those vessels. There was some rumor they had not had sufficient drugs to get them through jump, that some had made it without. He tried to imagine it-reckoned Elene's worry. Estelle's absence from that convoy was good news and bad. Likely she had shied off her declared course, catching wind of trouble, and gone elsewhere in a hurry... still cause for anxiety, with the war heating up out on the edge. A station... gone, blown. Russell's, evacuating personnel. The safe edge was suddenly much too close, much too fast.

"It's likely," he said, wishing that he could save the news for another day, but she had to know, "that we'll be moved to blue, into maybe cramped quarters. The clean-clearance personnel are the ones that can be transferred to that section. Well have to be among the ones to go."

She shrugged. "That's all right. It's arranged?"

"It will be."

A second time she shrugged; they lost their home and she shrugged, staring at the windows onto the docks below, and the crowds, and the merchanter ships. "It's not coming here," he insisted, trying to believe it, for Pell was his home, in a way no merchanter was likely to understand. Konstantins had built this place, from the days of its beginning. "Whatever the Company losses-not Pell."

And a moment later, moved by conscience if not by courage: "I've got to get over there, onto the quarantine docks." iii Norway eased in ahead of the others, with the hubbed, unsightly torus of Pell a gleaming sprawl in her vid screens. The riders were fanned out, fending off the freighters for the moment. The merchanter crews in command of those refugee ships wisely held the line, giving her no trouble. The pale crescent of Pell's World... Downbelow, in Pell's matter-of-fact nomenclature... hung beyond the station, swirled with storms. They matched up with Pell Station's signal, drawing even with the flashing lights on the area designated for their docking. The cone which would receive their nose probe glowed blue with the come-aheads. section orange, the distorted letters read on vid, beside a tangle of solar vanes and panels. Signy punched in scan, saw things where they ought to be on Pell's borrowed image. Constant chatter flowed from Pell central and the ship channels, keeping a dozen techs busy at com.

They entered final approach, lost gee gently as Norway's rotating inner cylinder, slung gutwise in its frame, slowed and locked to docking position, all personnel decks on the star tion's up and down. They felt other stresses magnified for a time, a series of reorientations. The cone loomed, easy dock, and they met the grapple, a dragging confirmation of the last slam of gee-opened accesses for Pell dock crews, stable now, and solidly part of Pell's rotation. "I'm getting an all-quiet on dockside," Graff said. "The stationmaster's police are all over the place."

"Message," com said. "Pell stationmaster to Norway: request military cooperation with desks set up to facilitate processing as per your instructions. All procedures are as you requested, with the stationmaster's compliments, captain." "Reply: Hansford coming in immediately with crisis in lifesupport and possible riot conditions. Stay back of our lines. Endit.-Graff, take over operations. Di, get me those troops out on that dock doubletime."

She left matters there, rose and strode back through the narrow bowed aisles of the bridge to the small compartment which served her as office and oftentimes sleeping quarters. She opened the locker there and slipped on a jacket, slipped a pistol into her pocket. It was not a uniform. No one in the Fleet, perhaps, possessed a full-regulation uniform. Supply had been that bad, that long. Her captain's circle on her collar was her only distinction from a merchanter. The troops were no better uniformed, but armored: that, they kept in condition, at all costs. She hastened down via the lift into the lower corridor, proceeding amid the rush of troops Di Janz had ordered to the dock, combat-rigged, through the access tube and out into the chill wide s.p.a.ces.

The whole dock was theirs, vast, upward-curving perspective, section arches curtained by ceiling as the station rim curve swept leftward toward gradual horizon; on the right a section seal was in use, stopping the eye there. The place was vacant of all but the dock crews and their gantries; and station security and the processing desks, and those were well back of Norway's area. There were no native workers, not here, not in this situation. Debris lay scattered across the wide dock, papers, bits of clothing, evidencing a hasty withdrawal. The dockside shops and offices were empty; the niner corridor midway of the dock showed likewise vacant and littered. Di Janz's deep bellow echoed in the metal girders overhead as he ordered troops deployed about the area where Hansford was coming in.

Pell dockers moved up. Signy watched and gnawed her lip nervously, glanced aside as a civ came up to her, youngish, darkly aquiline, bearing a tablet and looking like business in his neat blue suit. The plug she had in one ear kept advising her of Hansford's status, a constant clamor of bad news. "What are you?" she asked "Damon Konstantin, captain, from Legal Affairs."

She spared a second look. A Konstantin. He could be that. Angelo had had two boys before his wife's accident. "Legal Affairs," she said with distaste. "I'm here if you need anything... or if they do. I've got a com link with central."

There was a crash. Hansford made a bad dock, grated down the guidance cone and shuddered into place.

"Get her hooked up and get out!" Di roared at the dock crews: no com for him. Graff was ordering matters from Norway's command. Hansford's crew would stay sealed on their bridge, working debarcation by remote. "Tell them walk out," she heard relayed from Graff. "Any rush at troops will be met with fire." The hookups were complete. The ramp went into place. "Move!" Di bellowed. Dockers pelted behind the lines of troops; rifles were levelled. The hatch opened, a crash up the access tube. A stench rolled out onto the chill of the dock. Inner hatches opened and a living wave surged out, trampling each other, falling. They screamed and shouted and rushed out like madmen, staggered as a burst of fire went over their heads. "Hold it!" Di shouted. "Sit down where you are and put your hands on your heads."

Some were sitting down already, out of weakness; others sank down and complied.

A few seemed too dazed to understand, but came no farther. The wave had stopped. At Signy's elbow Damon Konstantin breathed a curse and shook his head. No word of laws from him; sweat stood visibly on his akin. His station stared riot in the face... collapse of systems, Hansford's death ten thousandfold. There were a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty living, crouched on the dock by the umbilical gantry. The ship's stench spread. A pump labored, flushing air through Hansford's systems under pressure. There were a thousand on that ship. "We're going to have to go in there," Signy muttered, sick at the prospect. Di was moving the others one at a time, pa.s.sing them under guns into a curtained area where they were to be stripped, searched, scrubbed, pa.s.sed on to the desks or to the medics. Baggage there was none, not with this group, nor papers worth anything.

"Need a security team suited up for a contamination area," she told young Konstantin. "And stretchers. Get us a disposal area prepared. We're going to vent the dead; it's all we can do. Have them ID'ed as best you can, fingerprints, photos, whatever. Every corpse pa.s.sed out of here unidentified is future trouble for your security."

Konstantin looked ill. That was well enough. So did some of her troops. She tried to ignore her own stomach.

A few more survivors had made their way to the opening of the access, very weak, almost unable to get down the ramp. A handful, a scant handful. Lila was coming in, her approach begun in her crew's panic, defying instructions and riders' threats. She heard Graffs voice reporting it, activated her own mike. "Stall them off. Clip a vane off them if you have to. We've got our hands full. Get me a suit out here."

They found seventy-eight more living, lying among the decomposing dead. The rest was cleanup, and no more threat. Signy pa.s.sed decontamination, stripped off the suit, sat down on the bare dock and fought a heaving stomach. A civ aid worker chose a bad time to offer her a sandwich. She pushed it away, took the local herbal coffee and caught her breath in the last of the processing of Hansford's living. The place stank now of antispetic fogging.

A carpet of bodies in the corridors, blood, dead. Hansford's emergency seals had gone into place during a fire. Some of the dead had been cut in two. Some of the living had broken bones from being trampled in the panic. Urine. Vomit. Blood. Decay. They had had closed systems, had not had to breathe it. The Hansford survivors had had nothing at the last but the emergency oxygen, and that had possibly been a cause of murder. Most of the living had been sealed into areas where the air had held out less fouled than the badly ventilated storage holds where most of the refugees had been crammed.

"Message from the stationmaster," com said into her ear, "requesting the captain's presence in station offices at the earliest."

"No," she sent back shortly. They were bringing Hansford's dead out; there was some manner of religious service, a.s.sembly-line fashion, some amenity for the dead before venting them. Caught in Downbelow's gravity well, they would drift in that direction, eventually. She wondered vaguely whether bodies burned in falling: likely, she thought. She had not much to do with worlds. She was not sure whether anyone had ever cared to find out.

Lila's folk were exiting in better order. They pushed and shoved at the first, but they stopped it when they saw the armed troops facing them. Konstantin intervened with useful service over the portable loudspeaker, talking to the terrified civs in stationers' terms and throwing stationers' logic in their faces, the threat of damage to fragile balances, the kind of drill and horror story they must have heard all their confined lives. Signy put herself on her feet again during the performance, still holding the coffee cup, watched with a calmer stomach as the procedures she had outlined began to function smoothly, those with papers to one area and those without to another, for photographing and ID by statement. The handsome lad from Legal Affairs proved to have other uses, a voice of ringing authority when it regarded disputed paper or confused station staff.

"Griffin's moving up on docking," Graffs voice advised her. "Station advises us they're wanting back five hundred units of confiscated housing based on Hansford's casualties."

"Negative," she said flatly. "My respects to station command, but out of the question. What's the status on Griffin?"

"Panicky. We've warned them."

"How many others are coming apart?"

"It's tense everywhere. Don't trust it. They could bolt, any one of them.

Maureen was one dead, coronary, another ill. I'm routing her in next. Stationmaster asks whether you'll be available for conference in an hour. I pick up that the Company boys are making demands to get into this area." "Keep stalling." She finished the coffee, walked along the lines in front of Griffin's dock, the whole operation moving down a berth, for there was nothing left at Hansford's berth worth guarding. There was quiet from the processed refugees. They had the matter of locating their lodgings to occupy them, and the station's secure environment to comfort them. A suited crew stood by to move Hansford out; they had only four berths at this dock. Signy measured with her eye the s.p.a.ce the station had allotted them, five levels of two sections and the two docks. Crowded, but they would manage for a while. Barracks could solve some of it... temporarily. Things would get tighter. No luxuries, that was certain. They were not the only refugees adrift; they were simply the first. And upon that knowledge she kept her mouth shut.

It was Dinah that broke the peace; a man caught with weapons in scan, a friend who turned ugly on his arrest: two dead, then, and sobbing, hysterical pa.s.sengers afterward. Signy watched it, simply tired, shook her head and ordered the bodies vented with the rest, while Konstantin approached her with angry arguments. "Martial law," she said, ending all discussion, and walk away. Sita, Pearl, Little Bear, Winifred. They came in with agonizing slowness, unloaded refugees and property, and the processing inches its way along. Signy left the dock then, went back aboard Norway and took a bath. She scrubbed three times all over before she began to feel that the smell and the sights had left her.

Station had entered alterday; complaints and demands had fallen silent at least for a few hours.

Or if there were any, Norway's alterday command fended them off her. There was comfort for the night, company of sorts, a leave-taking. He was another item of salvage from Russell's and Mariner... not for transport on the other ships. They would have torn him apart. He knew this, and appreciated matters. He had no taste for the crew either, and understood his situation. "You're getting off here," she told him, staring at him, who lay beside her. The name did not matter. It confused itself in her memory with others, and sometimes she called him hy the wrong one, late, when she was half asleep. He showed no emotion at that statement, only blinked, indication that he had absorbed the fact. The face intrigued her: innocence, perhaps. Contrasts intrigued her. Beauty did. "You're lucky," she said. He reacted to that the same way, as he reacted to most things. He simply stared, vacant and beautiful; they had played with his mind on Russell's. There was a sordidness in her sometimes, a need to deal wounds... limited murder, to blot out the greater ones. To deal little terrors, to forget the horror outside. She had sometime nights with Graff, with Di, with whoever took her fancy. She never showed this face to those she valued, to friends, to crew. Only sometimes there were voyages like this one, when her mood was black. It was a common disease, in the Fleet, in the sealed worlds of ships without discharge, among those in absolute power. "Do you care?" she asked; he did not, and that was, perhaps, his survival. Norway remained, her troops visibly on duty on the dock-side, the last ship berthed in quarantine. On the dock, the lights were still at bright noon, over lines which moved only slowly, under the presence of the guns.

Chapter Three.

Pell: 5/2a*/52 *Alterday Too many sights, too much of such things. Damon Konstantin took a cup of coffee from one of the aid workers who pa.s.sed the desk and leaned on his arm, stared out across the docks and tried to rub the ache from his eyes. The coffee tasted of disinfectant, as everything here smelled of it, as it was in their pores, their noses, everywhere. The troops stayed on guard, keeping this little area of the dock safe. Someone had been knifed in Barracks A. No one could explain the weapon. They thought that it had come from the kitchen of one of the abandoned restaurants on dockside, a piece of cutlery unthinkingly left behind, by someone who had never realized the situation. He found himself exhausted beyond sense. He had no answers; station police could not find the offender, in the lines of refugees which still wended their way out there across the docks, inching along to housing desks.

A touch descended on his shoulder. He turned an aching neck, blinked up at his brother. Emilio settled in the vacant chair next to him, hand still on his shoulder. Elder brother. Emilio was in alterday central command. It -was alterday now, Damon realized muzzily. The wake-sleep worlds in which they two seldom met on duty had gotten lapped in the confusion. "Go home," Emilio said gently. "My turn, if one of us has to be here. I promised Elene I'd send you home. She sounded upset."

"All right," he agreed, but he failed to move, lacking the volition or the energy. Emilio's hand tightened, fell away.

"I saw the monitors," Emilio said. "I know what we've got here." Damon tightened his lips against a sudden rush of nausea, staring straight before him, not at refugees, but at infinity, at the future, at the undoing of what had always been stable and certain. Pell. Theirs, his and Elene's, his and Emilio's. The Fleet took license on itself to do this to them and there was nothing they could do to stop it, because the refugees were poured in too suddenly, and they had no alternatives ready. "I've seen people shot down," he said. "I didn't do anything. I couldn't. Couldn't fight the military. Dissent... would have caused a riot. It would have taken all of us under. But they shot people for breaking a line."